The Quest for the ‘Right’ Data: beginning with research design
One aspect of the learning process within my research internship this semester is applying the GIS skills I am learning to my senior capstone project. As I wrap up the literature review portion of my research, I am diving headfirst into the research design for my project which includes the identification of the data sources I will use to answer my research question. As I mentioned at the inception of this blog in my post A Brief Introduction , understanding the nuances of your research question are fundamental to bring you toward identifying the ‘right’ data sources needed to bring your audience to the same page analytically. Here, I want to guide you through my own process as an amateur ArcGIS user in identifying the appropriate data sources for my project.
Using Boston as a case study, to what extent does the rise of smart cities impact equity within the city?
This is the underlying question that is guiding my senior capstone project at Northeastern University. What I found in the process of my research and attempt at piecing together the data together in a way that would illustrate my hypothesis (yes, smart technology in the city does impact equity by failing to engage the most disadvantage populations), is that your first instinct is not always your best instinct.
My initial reaction was to turn toward U.S. Census and American Community Survey employment data to illustrate the dispersal of information technology jobs throughout the City, and then compare this to the location of environmental justice communities as defined by MassGIS. However, after digging through the Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Location Database I realized that mapping out the location of jobs with a specific sector, was not getting to the heart of my question; civic engagement through new mobile applications.
From there, with the guidance of urban informatics professors at Northeastern University, I turned toward the lovely beast that is big data for help. This catch phrase that everyone seems to be throwing around is actually proving to be the key in untangling the research question I’ve been poking at for three months. I am lucky enough that the usage data for a local civic engagement app called Citizen’s Connect is readily available for analysis. This will allow me to visualize spatially, the location of users of the app and then overlaying that with the environmental justice communities determine whether these at risk communities are really being reached by this specific advance in civic technology.
Although the scope of my analysis is much narrower than I originally thought it would be, by picking out a new source of data I have come much closer to visualizing the question I am actually trying to answer. Which just illustrates that, ‘if at first you don’t succeed...” well you know the drill.